Dear Ms.

Agosta, During our English 1102 course I have been enlightened into the world of various styles of writing. I have done journaling, peer work shopping, a narrative, extended research, an annotated bibliography and an analytical genre piece. These types of writing have caused me to approach each with a varying degree of precision. The journaling aspect of this course in responding to your in class questions has allowed me to gain a larger understanding of identity development as well as the inner complexities of discovery. My journal entries were often somewhat lengthy but also informal because they were simply used for my own learning purposes with the understanding that they would not be used to convey information to a larger audience. Approaching peer workshops was another integral part of your class because it allowed me to receive valuable insight on how to improve various writing pieces of mine that would later be submitted to you for a grade. Often, work shopping required me to take an outsider's point of view when responding to others writing because it would provide a different viewpoint to actually capture a classmates piece in a spectators light. As a writer, the research I have done has had the greatest impact on myself because it was an extended process the entailed learning how to excel in various writing environments in order to communicate my identity discovery. In many ways all of these types of writing have worked together as I have pursued my work as a writer. From blogging to writing my complete genre piece, these writing types required a high level of focus, responsiveness and attention to detail in order to carry out my purpose of exploring identity as well as different types of language. The genre piece was the most important work of this course because it incorporated all phases of my research, reading comprehension and narrative writing. By completing the genre piece you were able to observe how I worked this semester to combine my research into a coherent presentation of my project study. The genre

piece revealed a major strength in my writing which was my ability to convey a significant amount of information to a wider audience with the purpose of engaging their attention to what was showed through that information. Writing the genre piece encompassed a multi-step process beginning with jotting down ideas onto a sheet a paper to later placing all my ideas into a coherent outline. This process proved to display all my strengths as writer from my organization skills, persuasive language and ability to articulate a large quantity of information to an audience. All of these strengths were not as evident through my blog entries showing a key weakness of mine in lacking these same organization skills when working with less room to operate. In blogging there was a set criteria standard for what each entry had to meet so this often caused me to display less articulation skills when analyzing readings we've done because I did not feel I had the same space to explain the text in a way that made sense to others through 500 words or fewer. A major challenge I faced was incorporating the messages from Gee and Holland into my research and later writings. However, I was able to respond to this challenge by implementing a forum in my writings to evaluate each scholar's teachings in relation to my research study. For example, in my genre piece I had a specific section in which I explained how Gee's teachings of identities persisted through my identity discovery of freshmen students here at UNC Charlotte. My level of thinking has certainly been altered as a result of reading scholars such as Holland but also because the journey through my research has allowed me to see the world through a new perspective. Before this course I saw identity as a zero sum game in which a person either had it or didn't. But through what I have learned from Gee, Holland and my own research is that people are more complex then the initial eye meets while also featuring various at times contrasting identities forms. By viewing the ever-evolving forms of people's identity I have been able to take on the identity of a researcher. I feel captured inside the world of a research because I can see

outside of the basic formations of humans and instead look into what impacts such changes in their identification. The environment plays a huge role in establishing people's discourse and affinity identity in society so if I can grasp and understand such environmental changes I become better able to identify how a person's identity has continued to evolve. This is a new development because I am able to take an outsider's perspective to gain an insider's point of view. Throughout this semester I have learned a lot of new types of writing that exhibited outstanding strengths in my writing abilities while also revealing points of weakness. Nonetheless, this course has enabled me to gain a sustainable knowledge of the finer details of research and how each detail is essential to ultimately realizing a huge or potentially groundbreaking discovery.